Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Director: Don Taylor

Cast: Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Bradford Dillman, Ricardo Montalbán

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: First of all, and I don’t think my eventual re-watch of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) will turn me around on this, but as a general rule you can’t go wrong including Ricardo Montalbán in your science fiction sequel. I challenge you to find me an exception.

There’s a level at which I want to say this might even be superior to <Planet of the Apes (1968)>, and I’m not entirely sure it is insane. Certainly, this third film in the series is less iconic than anything that culminates in Charlton Heston trying to have an argument with a be-togaed French lady (shit, there I go again, spoiling the first one for you…) but even that is a subjective argument. Maybe Escape from the Planet of the Apes has some special meaning for you. What cannot be disputed is that Escape is a far cheaper film then either of its predecessors, to the point where the title almost begins to seem like a misnomer. Then again, A Trio of Apes Travel to and Attempt to Adapt to Life on the Planet of the Humans lacks a certain poetry.

Lest you think that is knock against the film, let me say without any doubt that quality is its secret strength. Right from the opening credits where we’re led to believe that cohorts of Heston’s Taylor or Franciscus’ Brent have somehow made it back to a recognizable version of terra firma, only to be greeted by two of our favorite apes from prior films (and a friend (Sal Mineo)) have somehow found their way on the other end of the franchise’s denial. A dour, foolish sort of person may look at this premise and say that the near-plausible accounting of time travel in the first two films (am I the first person to ever attach the word “plausible” to <Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)>? Quite possibly, yes.) is flipped on its head when it is no longer a matter of time dilation, and instead a stable rift in the fabric of time which will allow travelers to travel back and forth between the simian and human ages.

What this premise does is trick—and quite masterfully so—the audience into letting their guard down. The jaunty Jerry Goldsmith score and the playful banter between Zira (Hunter) and Cornelius (McDowall) all makes you think that this is going to be “the funny one” in the series. For much of its runtime, Escape delivers on that process. We even get a delightful homage of Zira and Cornelius trying on human fashions. You are not prepared when matters become not only just as bleak as the two previous films, but heartbreaking to boot. No longer are we confronted with the massive tragedy of all of humans or apes being snuffed out in an instant, we are forced to watch the painful, tragic death of two characters we have grown quite fond of over the course of three films, and their child lives on, to start the process all over again in just about the only sci-fi headfake ending in this series to rival the first. The bleakness of this series becomes no longer an abstract, and it is all the more heartbreaking for it.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Director: Ted Post

Cast: James Franciscus, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Linda Harrison

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: What’s more, I remember liking it quite a bit when I saw it nearly thirty years ago. There was just something about that ending which struck me as just bonkers enough to make the whole thing memorable. Now? It feels like the classic movie blunder of possessing not so much a conclusion as a halt to the proceedings. Taylor (Charlton Heston, returning but with a look plastered on his face that hopes beyond hope no one will notice him) pushes a giant red button in the furthest depths of the Forbidden Zone, and then we get Orson Welles’ non-Union equivalent in place of what would have satisfied simple, child-like tastes: a big explosion.

The problems with this one go a fair bit deeper (Ha. Get it?) than just the ending. The special effects are somehow even more dodgy than in <its predecessor>. Sure, some of that could be written off to the fact that some of the potentially more epic sights are actually tricks played on the apes by the denizens of the Forbidden Zone, but it’s pretty difficult to not get pulled out of the movie when battle scenes are actually two different shots—one of apes wandering the desert, the other of a fire—optically processed together.

One might be able to get over all that and try to embrace that vibe I must have seen it way-back-when, if it weren’t for the fact that the film feels the need to speed through all of the story beats of the last film, only with Brent (Francsiscus; speaking of bargain basement replacements for the iconic). This serves to keep me from really enjoying it, even on the terms of pure B-movie cheese. It gets a bit boring.

Barbie (2023)

Director: Greta Gerwig

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Had ambitions to do a true Barbenheimer double feature with Oppenheimer (2023) last week, but the fates of schedules saw that it didn’t happen.

Did I Like It: It’s going to be very difficult to find a unique or unusual take on this movie. It’s so thoroughly captured the zeitgeist, if you are reading this, you probably have a very particular opinion about the film. You probably have thoughts on the subject regardless of whether or not you’ve seen the film; the only qualification is being alive in any sort of rudimentary way.

A subset of those people are men. Well, we’ll broaden the definition of that word to include male persons allowed to vote. They feel attacked by the film.

I really, truly, don’t understand how someone can come to that conclusion. Let’s forget for a moment that the movie is genuinely very funny and far, far weirder than one has any right to expect from a major studio release. The notion that Barbie is somehow anti-man is laughable on its face. Even though the Kens, led by Beach Ken (Gosling) try to bring the patriarchy to Barbieland, when the plan falls apart they are not pilloried. They’re forgiven. Ken himself doesn’t get the girl, but he wasn’t going to get the girl even if he hadn’t made all of the mistakes he did. He gets an opportunity to find some degree of happiness without Barbie, and presumably without using every photoshoot Sylvester Stallone exposed us to in the 80s as the Platonic ideal of masculinity.

What they mean to say is it empowers women, and that’s all they need to hear before they could even try to realize it is not only empowering to women, but oddly (in the best way) life affirming to men as well. I say that not as someone who might view himself as better than the complainers, but as someone who got called out pretty thoroughly by the Kens’ behavior, too. (The scene with The Godfather… struck a chord, but it was definitely a fair hit.)

I’d be willing to put money not only on the fact that it has an inside track on best picture in the spring, but also that we are about to enter an age not of mega-budget superhero-fests in hope that they have the next Avengers: Endgame (2019) on their hands, but instead of female-skewing, unashamedly weird, IP-based movies that cost about 100 million dollars. If Mr. Zaslav, head of Warner Bros. Discovery is reading this, haaaaave you met Batgirl?

St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)

Director: Joel Schumacher

Cast: Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy

Have I Seen It Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: Question before we go any further. How did fully half of <The Breakfast Club (1985)> go from detention to that disaffected first year after college in less than six months? Isn’t that the biggest special effect asking us to leap from our logic in 1985?

If I’m asking those kinds of questions about the movie, I couldn’t have along for the ride, free of any self-consciousness. The reputation of the film is one of general revulsion, countered only by the fact that it appealed and continues to appeal to a certain subset of the population who were that terrible in 1985. As an infant at the time, I was probably terrible, but at least I had an excuse.

I think you would be hard pressed to find a review that isn’t fixated on just how terrible all of the characters. And that’s because they are. Well, everyone except Wendy (Mare Winningham), about whom I spend the entire runtime wondering why she was hanging out with these people. It celebrates their worst impulse not only for far longer than any sane film would have, but as a central, load-bearing element of the entire film’s rationale for existing in the first place.

Several of them ought to be arrested*. Most of them probably ought to not have jobs. I can’t imagine any of them adding value to the universe by marrying and having kids.

You might think I’ve become an old fuddy duddy (or as the movie would have you believe: interested in a quiet place for brunch). You might think I have some unresolved issues with the films of Joel Schumacher. <The Flash (2023)> kinda proved that much, so I’ll cede that point, if nothing else.

Here’s where the problem lies in the film. Much of it rings unnervingly true, making the film all the more frustrating. Have I worked in a job in social services where—if the film had bothered to stay a moment longer in the scene—it would have become the single most preposterous series of events ever captured on film? Maybe… Did I spend any sustained moment of my twenties with a particular opinion about Billy Joel’s The Stranger**? I mean, sure. Didn’t we all? Was I the President of my college’s Young Democrats, only to slowly realize that if I were to have any kind of future in politics, I was really going to have to switch sides? Listen: at least I decided to get out of the game all together. Did I ever (read: usually) try to weird my affection for and knowledge of the films of Woody Allen as my opening line with women?

Damn it, Schumacher. I didn’t come to the movies to get called out like that.

*They are all male, in case you were wondering, and I’m mostly thinking about Kirbo (Estevez), before who you think I’m thinking of, although he should spend some time in a cell, too. Incidentally, I also don’t think there is any way Kirbo ended up successfully finishing a year of law school, to say nothing of becoming a lawyer. Don’t ask me how I know.

**I still don’t quite know what Alec (Judd Nelson) was on about in that scene. If you can explain it to me, please reach out to me on any still-functioning social media platform.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

Cast: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. Those far-flung summers where all I need out of life was what I’ve come to think of as the Albertson’s Special. Some chicken from the Deli, and five VHS (kids, ask your parents) rentals (kids, ask your parents) from the grocery video department (kids, ask your grandparents). Perfectly fit for five-film franchises (at the time) of varying quality, like this or the Superman films (yes, I’m counting Supergirl (1984), and you should, too; it’s better than Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)).

Man, to live again in a time when cholesterol and VHS tapes were all one needed on a hot day…

Did I Like It: If you’re reading this review, you’ve probably already seen the movie. Or, at least, you’ve seen the last few seconds of it. The ending was ruined a good fifteen years before I was ever born. But, if you’re a fan of that particular brand of pulpy sci-fi (read: the kind of stuff at which Arthur C. Clarke, and by extension, Stanley Kubrick, would turn up their noses), then there is hardly a movie I could recommend more. One might be tempted—before getting into either actor’s later politics—to say that Heston is really just bringing the same schtick to the big screen Shatner was still using to make his living on the original Star Trek. Maybe it’s hard to wander around the any American western desert in a torn spacesuit and not evoke something resembling Shatner. That feels like a complaint, but it isn’t. It’s an attempt to bring in more eyes who have just seen the Statue of Liberty (crap, now I’ve gone ahead and spoiled it too) to a movie that has more than few other pleasures to offer.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr.

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new. I’ll occasionally detour in this section of a review and talk about the movie going experience. I could take a moment (again) to extoll the virtues of seeing movies actually projected on film (Oppenheimer is shaping up to be the third film I have seen this year projected on 35mm), or wonder if I will make a second trip to a theater to try to take in the film on IMAX, as I live in one of those unluckily uncivilized parts of human civilization without a 70mm venue (more on that in a bit), but what I really would like to do is give a message to that guy with the two cokes. I won’t get into it too much, but the fact that it took you the better part of twenty minutes to realize you had intended to go see Barbie will be something many of us will never forget.

Did I Like It: Before, people might look at you a little sideways if you made a declaration like Christopher Nolan is the closest thing a generation like ours is going to get to a Stanley Kubrick. The idea that Kubrick would be found within 1000 miles of a Batman movie is equal parts insanely intriguing and just insane, and one usually had to ignore most of Tenet (2020) (which I probably need to give another shot), but that pure devotion to the camera as quite possibly the most important part of the film at hand gives them both the same ambition.

Now we can say—without getting those funny looks, mind you—that Nolan even succeeds in that ambition. All of the tools of a master filmmaker are put to use, and that use is not some genre entertainment. I have no beef with genre entertainment. Without it, I might cease to exist altogether. But the next time someone complains that movies aren’t real movies anymore, I think they are having the unfortunate inherent myopia of someone seeing things as they happen. One might long for the days of the New Hollywood, where Lucas was making THX 1138 (1971) and Coppola could nearly bring a studio to the brink of bankruptcy, but those days had their lauded turkeys and bland entertainments, too*. Oppenheimer will be one of those movies we remember.

It is intense. It is merciless. It runs through its material with no real need to graft a heroic arc onto J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy). I listened to the source material, American Prometheus, earlier this year and to my observations there appeared to not be much—if any—dramatic embellishment to bring the story to the screen. It’s a bold move that could have backfired and made the film frightfully boring. And yet, it isn’t. Oppenheimer is easily one of the best films of the year, and may yet take my top spot.

One other note I can’t help but make: I saw a comment—the source of which escapes me, tragically—which said that it is rare to see a film where there are easily close to a dozen career-best performances from bona fide movie stars. That’s true, but it would be hard to honestly engage with a review without dwelling on what Robert Downey Jr. has done here. For years he had been giving the best performances in tiny films, even when he wasn’t necessarily conscious of what he was doing. Then, surprising nearly everyone, he became the world’s biggest movie star. One might point to Dolittle (2020) as a sign that he couldn’t keep making franchises forever, but I imagine if he was committed to the idea of playing Iron Man forever, even in films which had nothing to do with Marvel Comics, he would have had more successes than failures in the long run. Instead, he tries now to surprise us all again and remind us why we all thought he was great in the first place.

*Granted, all of those trifles were shot on film, so even something like The Love Bug (1971), were it released today, would be in serious contention for a Best Cinematography Oscar.

Wonder Boys (2000)

Director: Curtis Hanson

Cast: Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey, Jr., Frances McDormand

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes…

Did I Like It: I was having a conversation with a friend recently, and she described Free Enterprise (1999) as one of—if not her absolute—favorite film ever. That caused me to shake my head a bit, as even when I first saw that film at the tender age of 17-or-so, I found the film to be a cheap, misanthropic riff of Play it Again, Sam (1972) and Swingers (1996) (and that’s when it was hitting its intended target). Seeing my dubious reaction, she immediately explained that watching the film feels like “being with my people.”

She hardly turned me around on the fictionalized exploits of Mark Altman and Robert Burnett (or Shatner rapping, certainly) but I couldn’t help but think of this movie.

I can’t imagine myself as accomplished and revered (or even as easily traditionally published) as even the most hapless character in the movie, but: Have I sat, mildly disaffected at a party, idly providing character histories for the people apparently enjoying themselves? Yes, yes I have. Have I stifled a laugh while attending a writing lecture? Yes. Yes, I have. Many times. Have I thought that writing conferences were kind of silly, and only wanted to go do some writing or hang out with other people that might actually have some ambition towards the completion or consumption of a book? Yes. Many, many times. Would I feel like I don’t have anything to contribute to an adult conversation other than movie trivia, and would be far more interested in priceless movie memorabilia than anything else at the host’s house? Have you met me?

Maybe these characters are not “my people,” but they are what “my people” are often like at their best. They’re what I want my people to be.

That’s more than enough to recommend the movie, I would think. But is it objectively good. Do I extol the virtues of the film, only to invite the sideways glances I give Free Enterprise? I would think not. The film manages to wrangle Chabon’s sprawling contemplative novel into a night-in-the-life story which tends to deflect the maudlin and embrace the jaunty. Putting aside my sentimental feelings for the movie, Douglas harnesses the same “likable asshole” energy which even ten years earlier would have been right in Jack Nicholson’s wheelhouse. The rest of the cast is great, too, to a performer straddling the line between funny and authentic*.

*Remember when Robert Downey Jr. was in movies which didn’t give a rat’s ass about the four quadrants? I do too, and… I might just be itching to get to my screening of Oppenheimer (2023).

Biosphere (2023)

Director: Mel Eslyn

Cast: Sterling K. Brown, Mark Duplass

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. In a supreme twist of fate, Lora talked me into going to see a movie I had yet to hear about.

Did I Like It: I mean this in the best possible way. This movie is very strange. Go ahead, watch the trailer real quick before we begin. I’ll wait.

Pretty strange, right? Here’s the thing, it’s far stranger than anyone will tell you before actually starting the movie. It’s more than just strange. It’s a perfectly functional buddy comedy, a tragedy (depending on how you read that ending, and how long has it been since I’ve really had to think about the ending of a movie?), and a surprisingly thoughtful deconstruction of what we collectively think about gender now.

You read that right. A lot of that isn’t in the trailer.

On spec, the film appears to be a micro-budget sci-fi piece the kind of which we haven’t really seen since Cube (1997) (one might want to point to Moon (2009), but even that film had to spend a fair amount of money to make the audience believe Sam Rockwell was marooned on ). Then again, maybe independent studios are making this kind of film all the time and this like most of those others will disappear into hazy, incomplete memory all too quickly.

But I really don’t think this one will slip into obscurity, assuming enough people get eyes on it. I for one won’t readily forget the Duplass playing a one of the last men on earth/the President of the United States who is likely—by all accounts, almost certainly—responsible for this sad state of affairs, while Brown plays his boyhood best friend/top aide/last-rational-man-on-the-planet-long-before-the-shit-went down. As “life finds a way” (they both appear to be roughly my age, as their references are just so) their relationship continues to develop, even in the face of their own extinction.

I’d tell you more, but that would be ruining most of the truly surprising parts of the movie. Go see it first and then find me. I’d love to talk about it.

Blood Quantum (2019)

Director: Jeff Barnaby

Cast: Michael Greyeyes, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Forrest Goodluck, Kiowa Gordon

Have I Seen it Before: Never. For some reason I have as yet relented to subscribing to Shudder. As we approached the episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods for this movie, I thought about relenting to one more streaming service, and if there were more movies on this year’s Cabin schedule that could be found there, I might have.

Did I Like It: I really, really have lost most of my patience with the very idea of zombies. I can only imagine if you’re reading this that at some point you’ve given up on The Walking Dead. Whenever that moment was for you, I guarantee I jumped ship earlier than that. The commentary of George Romero is long since gone for me, and the craft of making up the creatures was probably passé for me even when Romero was at his height.

And with all of that being said, there’s quite a lot new, and a lot to like here.

I cannot honestly think of a better introduction to a zombie apocalypse than a fisherman suddenly realizing something is terribly, terribly wrong with the already cleaned and gutted catch of the day.

That alone would have inched me closer to making the unlikely conclusion that the genre might still have some life (or, I suppose un-life, if you’re going to force me to relent to the pun orbiting around me) in it yet, but making the supposed realities of a zombie apocalypse a reflection of the indigenous experience made the entire experience refreshing. What’s more, the central plot line involving the fate of the baby to be born to Joseph (Goodluck) and Charlie (Olivia Scriven) keeps the tension up, not just because it is unclear how the character’s fates will be resolved, but it’s never completely made clear what the movie would prefer to happen to them.

I’m even prepared to forgive the film for occasionally becoming a very typical zombie film in the execution, but please, let’s keep that between you and I.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg

Have I Seen it Before: Nope, but if the one religious figure who takes a clear stand on the vagaries of motion blurring wants me to do something, I do it. Especially when it means coming out to the theater for his nearly 300 million dollar* epic. If he starts making other demands of me, we’re just going to have to take those on a case by case basis.

Did I Like It: I like it when the following things happen to me:

- Spy movies make me feel like I could engage in espionage and intrigue, even though there is a plethora of airtight evidence that I would be absolutely crushed by any job with even slightly higher pressure than the one I currently have.

- I am witness to Tom Cruise proceeding with a series of increasingly preposterous stunts, which will inevitably culminate in what I can only assume is his somewhat hilarious demise.

- I get to sit in a darkened, air conditioned room and eat M & Ms. (Really, this would qualify when I get to sit in a brightly lit room with M & Ms, but they work even better in the dark)

- Mission: Impossible sequels make reference to the first—and for my money, the best—Mission: Impossible (1996).

On those qualifications, the movie is an unparalleled success, especially the last one, where with the inclusion of Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) this feels like—more than any other film in the series—a direct sequel to the original. Sure, the plot may feel a little saggy in the middle and a little convoluted, but the impulse to label that as a complain about the movie should really be redefined as a return to form.

* Studios, if you keep doing that… Forget it. It’s not worth getting into it right now, but one imagines I’m going to have a lot more to same by the time Barbie and Oppenheimer roll into town.

High Fidelity (2000)

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Iben Hjelje

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, well. Where does one begin with a question like that? I’m not entirely sure just how many times I saw this movie in the spring of 2003 (for reasons) but I do know it was a lot. Change popular music to movies, and I felt a lot like Rob Gordon there for a little bit about twenty years back.

Did I Like It: We’re a different world now. I’ve changed, and even Rob Gordon (Cusack) has changed*. Can a movie which lived so aggressively rent free in my head at one time mean the same thing now? Should it?

As with many other movies I have seen dozens of times before, I had half a dozen other things going on while it was playing, but I couldn’t help dropping those other things and once again being transfixed by the movie. I doubt I’ll ever have it on repeat again like I did back then, but the memories are all still there, and enough time has passed to make them something akin to pleasant. I wonder what Rob is like now. I’d like to think that he would have the same morbid fascination with his prior antics that I do.

Aside from that, every note of the movie feels correct. The soundtrack is great top to bottom, and that has almost nothing to do with the memories it inspires. Jack Black arrives as the movie star we now know him to be. It is truly impressive that the filmmakers were able to change the location of their adaptation from London to Chicago, aside from the long runner where Rob goes on and on about the hypothetical man “called Ian (Tim Robbins)” and I don’t think any American has ever avoided the verb “named” that resolutely.

* Played most recently by Zoë Kravitz in a recent television series that absolutely should have gotten a second season, but I digress

Tetris (2023)

Director: Jon S. Baird

Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Yefremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Been on the list to watch for a minute.

Did I Like It: The gold standard of any adaptation is does it make you want to continue the good feelings that the film engenders by going back to the source material.

Now, this isn’t really an adaptation of the game literally every person on planet earth both communist and capitalist has spent at least a little bit playing since 1989. How could one do that? Although, it’s not entirely departed from the puzzle game, as there is certainly a vibe in the films concluding car chase that urged me to play several rounds of the game after everything was done.

Now, the real strength of the film lies outside of those sequences. Indeed, any scenes trying to reach for special effects and production values take me out of the proceedings. Much of the climax, taking place during a massive Soviet parade has all the verisimilitude of an endless series of geometric shapes built out of four squares falling down from the ether.

And that’s a real shame, because the film has a real energy to it. Not the dour drudgery of The Social Network (2010), but a delightful, heist movie, borderline buddy cop energy that has easily been one of the more enjoyable movies I have taken in this year. Does it have anything to do with what actually happened between Henk Rogers (Egerton) and Alexey Pajitnov (Yefremov) and the road from Tetris being a Soviet home brew game to the ubiquitous puzzler of the 90s.

I might spend a little more time delving into the rest of the movie, but the reality is this review has been difficult to write. I keep stopping to play another round of Tetris.

The Third Man (1949)

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. You don’t write three—count ‘em, three—books about Orson Welles without wandering into this one a few times. Still not entirely sure why I didn’t include it in the massive Orson Welles re-watch I did before publishing The Once and Future Orson Welles, other than the fact that Welles didn’t direct the movie. But it should have been, right under scenes from Citizen Kane (1941), its scenes from this one that always make it into quick and dirty Welles retrospectives, along with radio clips from the War of the Worlds, or maybe a commercial or two for Paul Masson.

Did I Like It: When you think of the cream of the crop of film noir, you might want to swing your rhetorical arms for Peter Lorre, or Edward G. Robinson (really, there is a fine line between a gangster movie and film noir, although that Venn diagram can resemble an oval), but this is the A-list standard of the genre.

The cast is perfect, and I’m only kind of talking about Welles. You put a-list talent in a movie, and nearly any genre can transcend. Or, at least, it used to. Throw in a score that flies in the face of every convention, and you’re practically guaranteed to have a classic on your hands.

I was talking with another writer in recent years. They wrote crime novels (or, at least, tried to) and railed at how The Third Man’s crime story doesn’t quite add up. I get talked at a lot—or at least, more frequently than average—about Orson Welles films, and it often starts to resemble the grown ups in Peanuts cartoons trying to talk to me. But here, I could kind of see his point, Martins (Cotten) search for what happened to Harry Lime (Welles) meanders a bit in the middle, to where true enthusiasts of the genre might indeed lose patience.

But you know what? I’ll tell you what I told him. Why does that matter? So much Film Noir is all about mood, and between this film’s zither music and Welles eventual entrance into the picture, there’s more than enough mood to go around. The plot is fine, but it is absolutely not the reason you should have shown up in the first place.

Murder by Contract (1958)

Director: Irving Lerner

Cast: Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi, Caprice Toriel

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: Any quick glance into the film’s history and legacy tells the reader that this film was foundational to the early work of Scorsese. It’s easy to see it, Claude’s (Edwards) early, nervous leaps into the world of violent crime bring to mind some of the eccentricities of Robert de Niro’s performance as Travis Bickle. The style of the film is also the sort of vibrant, pleasant surprise one always hopes to get from a B picture. The score alone practically (although not totally) obliterates the memory of  a climax that plays a little too quickly and awkwardly for my tastes.

But there’s more than seeing were young Marty started to absorb some of his stylistic choices. Where there’s never any degree of doubt that the hero of Taxi Driver (1976) was crazy, Claude slinks through most of the film never boiling beyond a slightly raised voice. He’s far more frightening. He might show up at the door, and if he shows up at the door, it’s far too late for you. You might even think you have the angle on the world and hire him out yourself, but that is hardly going to save you from much of anything.

Honestly, this film has had more impact on the genre of crime films than even anything that Scorsese did, or even more than the likes of The Godfather (1972). I’d be willing to put a decent amount of money on the notion that the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto III was taken from our anti-hero here, not just in name, but in cool everyman silence that is far more unnerving than any psychotic the movies it influence might throw our way.

Village of the Damned (1995)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Linda Kozlowski, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m not 100% sure how, when my average of watching some of Carpenter’s later films has been low for quite a while, but I imagine it showed up on a Netflix recommendation at some point, and the thought becomes, “John Carpenter and Christopher Reeve? What could possibly go wrong?”

Did I Like It: And nothing much really does go wrong, so there’s that, but I can’t report much goes right, either.

With every one of Carpenter’s later movies, I keep lamenting the fact that at a certain point Dean Cundey stopped shooting his pictures. I mean, I guess Cundey at this moment is off shooting movies for Spielberg and the like, but is it really that hard for him to make the time for his older friend Carpenter? It seems like Carpenter is in a pattern with every othe movie in this phase of his career. With They Live (1988), I’m very nearly prepared to let Cundey go the way he wants to go (which was apparently directing Honey We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)) and just go withe the flow and accept what Gary B. Kibbe has to offer. Then I’m struck with Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), and I yearn for Carpenter’s glory days. But then, right on schedule In The Mouth of Madness (1994) threatens me with a Carpenter renaissance.

And now we’re here. One might want to nitpick the little things that went wrong. The special effects aren’t anything beyond the 1960 original, which really leaves one to wonder why they felt the need to remake the story in the first place. Reeve is solid, but he managed to be solid in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), so that defense will hardly work in the film’s defense. Alley made her bones in genre movies (or rather the genre movie, by way of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and I can’t ever dismiss someone who was in that movie), but it feels like she has just spent too much time doing sitcoms (again, anyone on Cheers on which I cannot and will not turn my back) to bring any degree of earnestness to really much of anything.

Ultimately, there is one problem that governs the film’s failures. Carpenter has been on the record saying he was a gun-for-hire (despite him getting his name above the title once more) , but there is not a moment where I needed him to tell me that. Everything here is perfunctory, and that is the last thing one wants to see from a Carpenter film. Ultimately, it’s unfair to think that Cundey shooting the thing would have saved much of anything.

Spielberg (2017)

Director: Susan Lacy

Cast: Steven Spielberg*

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Had been on my HBOMax to-watch list (or whatever the hell they called it) for years. Now that HBOMax is dead (long live, Max, apparently), and I’ve now watched The Fabelmans (2022) three times in as many months, the urge to finally view it became near overwhelming.

Did I Like It: Even that proved to be a several days long project. Not because the documentary is tough to get through. Quite to the contrary. I saw two minutes of this thing and it was so immediately beguiling that I felt guilty continuing without Lora.

Normally I view a documentary with a very specific list of criteria. First, is it professionally made? Does the sound all go together, and was it filmed with equipment indicative of someone trying to make money off of the endeavor, or someone with home video equipment who didn’t know any better. (It is sometimes more challenging for a film to clear this hurdle than one might think.) This certainly clears that, with HBO’s money backing it up and what appears to be a modicum of cooperation from the subject, one would imagine that the filmmakers wouldn’t deign to cheap out.

Does it have an unusual or surprising level of access to the subject? As mentioned earlier, Spielberg does sit down for some talking heads, although they appear to be taken over time and very well could be pulled from electronic press kits from any number of movies, but we also have footage of Spielberg blocking scenes from Bridge of Spies (2015)… which, now that I think about it, very well could have come from that film’s EPK. Might give this one an incomplete on this front. It isn’t like the movie dwells on any of Spielberg’s relative missteps. 1941 (1979) is given a moment to show Spielberg’s fallibility, but Hook (1991), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) are given the briefest of b-roll appearances, although I’ve always felt that a very honest documentary about the fourth Indiana Jones entry would be worth its own feature length documentary.

Does the film remember it is trying to tell a story? Here is where the film truly shines. Is a lot of this also covered by The Fabelmans, sure, but depicting Spielberg as a gifted man with a fair amount of doubts and insecurities about himself—to say nothing of giving the production of Schindler’s List (1993)—is where the film becomes truly fascinating, and more than worth a recomendation.

*Normally, I would put the first four billed stars of a film. This usually makes listing documentaries a little difficult. Here, where the is only a single central figure, and brief talking heads by everyone else, it is doubly so.

A Fool There Was (1915)

Director: Frank Powell

Cast: Theda Bara, Edward José, May Allison, Mabel Frenyear

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Given the near total disappearance of much of Bara’s filmography, it might never have occurred to me to watch it. Enter Circle Cinema’s Second Saturday Silent series.

Incidentally, as I continue to attend these screenings, I keep finding more and more theater behaviors that normally annoy me, but then desperately annoy me when I’m trying to fool myself for even brief flashes that I might be enveloped in the time of the silent picture, ripped free from my own stupid decade and century. This screening was no different. Now, with a film that has resoundingly slipped into the public domain, there’s probably not going to be any real standing for me to object to the person sitting next to me pulling out their cell phone and taking a picture while the film is playing, but it is certainly not something that people of the past had to deal with.

Did I Like It: I’ve often complained that many early sound films are stiff affairs barely qualifying as a motion picture. I might have over-romanticized the silent format too much, as it turns out. This affair—pun accepted, if not intended—plays out like reels of a home movie, barely coagulating into something audiences—both modern and of that era—would barely recognize as a story.

So, the film itself inspired in me a thought that feels antithetical to my own values. Age has worn down parts of the movie. Any number of cutaways to correspondence between characters is so unreadable and clearly a still photograph of a surviving frame that I could barely stifle laughter when they came on the screen. That degradation is to be expected, ultimately. The film surrounding it is such a dismal, enervating exercise that I actually started to entertain the notion that some films might deserve to disappear due to lack of preservation. It feels wrong, doubly so when one realizes that our current trash is unlikely to disappear, regardless of whether it deserves to or not.

In The Mouth of Madness (1994)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Porchnow, Charlton Heston

Have I seen it Before: Oh, sure. Oddly enough, my strongest memory of the film comes not from the film itself, but from the TV spots, ominously warning a ten-year-old me that, “In 1978, he scared you with… <Halloween>… In 1983, he terrified you with… <Christine>… His name is John Carpenter. It’s 1995.” Definitely inflamed the imagination, considering that was at a time when I had seen none of those films. Then again, if the ad campaign only served to entrance ten-year-old boys who couldn’t get a ticket under their own power, no wonder the film (yet again, for Carpenter) tanked at the box office.

Did I Like It: The man was ahead of his time, though. This would be right at home with many of the elevated horror films coming out today. No wonder Carpenter doesn’t really want to make films anymore. He’s pretty much already made every kind of film that might be able to get any kind of money behind it*.

Or maybe Carpenter was at exactly the right place and time to make this movie. Between this and <Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)>, there was a brief moment, just post-proper-Krueger where New Line was willing to embrace meta-horror before the movies really hadn’t even tried to grasp such a concept.

Philosophically, I’d say it’s a good thing that Memoirs of an Invisible Man happened, even if that film doesn’t amount to much of anything. It brough Neill and Carpenter together. Given Neill’s association with <Jurassic Park (1993)>, he was probably able to get any number of films off the ground, and that he was more into the idea of a Lovecraft-infused Carpenter horror picture. He provides an interesting counterpoint to Carpenter’s normal muse, Kurt Russell. It’s nice when Number 1 on the call sheet is an Olympic level asshole, but number 2 becomes your buddy.

My only qualm, and it is a minor one, is that the climax feels alternately cheap and rushed, to the point where the eldritch-y horror of the whole thing culminates in what amounts to a clip show of the movie I just watched. A constraint of budget, or a nervous studio dealing with an auteur who hadn’t had a hit in a number of years**, but I smell a film whose true ambitions for Weird-with-a-capital-w didn’t make it to opening weekend. Somebody ought to write a book about all the films of the early-to-mid nineties that mutated heavily in the editing room. Maybe I should…?

*Other than a superhero film. Could you imagine? Then again, <Starman (1992)> and <Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)> are out there. That probably shouldn’t count.

**Doubtful, as the head of production at the studio was the screenwriter, although a quick look at IMDB might point to some New Nightmare envy, especially after one of the only films for the studio he wrote was <Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).>

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

Director: Aaron Horvarth, Michael Jelenic

Cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black

Have I Seen it Before: Well, here’s the thing, if you’ll forgive me for getting into the review right away. As much as people—and by “people”, I also include both the corporation and creative professionals behind this movie—have looked down on Super Mario Bros. (1993) in the last thirty years, both of these films feel the need to start with nearly the same presence. Mario (Pratt, strangely not nearly as miscast as he appeared on spec) and Luigi (Day) are brave but put-upon Brooklyn plumbers who are pulled into a adventure taking place in a myserious world existing below the New York they know, with the help of a princess (Taylor-Joy) to put a stop to the evil plans of a… guy?… who might be alternatively called Bowser or Koopa, depending on the territory.

Those are the same movies, right? It wasn’t like establishing the brothers in our world was something with which the video games never seemed to bother.

Did I Like It: Aside from that strange parallel to its predecessor, I had to say I was pleasantly surprised by the majority of the film. As I said, Pratt wasn’t nearly as bad as he could have been. The rest of the cast equates itself well, and up until the moment he starts signing, Black is completely unrecognizable in the role. The humor and adventure are well-calibrated to not unduly favor one over the other. That feels like its a complaint, as if it couldn’t be bothered to be interesting, for fear of failing in the attempt, but I understand where they are coming from after everything that happened with the live action attempt. It is a safe, inoffensive piece of entertainment.

In fact, the only particular complaint I can reach for is the strange preponderance of needle drops littered throughout the film. “No Sleep till Brooklyn” might feel like it belongs in the movie, but it’s the Beastie Boys (I’m usually against them showing up anywhere in film, just see <Star Trek (2009)>, but they’re already in Brooklyn when it plays, and I’ve managed to beat all of the NES Mario games, but I apparently lack the skills to understand what “Take on Me” is doing here, other than the fact that the rights holders for a-ha are hard up for cash and willing to let it go for next to nothing.

Kindergarten Cop (1990)

Director: Ivan Reitman

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Penelope Ann Miller, Pamela Reed, Linda Hunt

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, definitely. I, too was six in 1990, so I’ll never not be the same age as these kids, no matter how old I get. I think the phrase “Mr. Kimble, are you all right?” is one of those top-five uttered phrases in my house. Oddly enough, I think I’ve probably seen it far more from a VHS-recorded broadcast on the NBC Sunday Night Movie in the mid-90s. It’s still weird to hear some of the characters swear mildly in a PG-13 sort of way. “Shove it up your ass” lives in my memory as “shove it” and “How did it feel to punch that son of a bitch” swaps out to “SOB.”

Did I Like It: As I started to type this review, the word “flawless” keeps floating through my head, even if that feels like something of a ridiculous word to bandy about in a film whose plot hinges on trope after trope after trope, when it isn’t pushed forward by bouts of food poisoning. But, what else is the film really aiming for? What’s more, the film manages to be surprisingly enlightened (minus a few moments where a large germanic man is making children march in coordination) on its views of early childhood education.

Schwarzenegger is aptly game, increasing his comic acumen that he all of a sudden revealed to everyone (by way of Reitman) in Twins (1988), and proves that he at least has less of an ego about his film persona, and in fact might simply be funnier than his contemporaries. Sure, Bruce Willis might have become famous with a comic persona, but it wore away as the years went on, give or take a The Whole Nine Yards (2000). Stallone can try to do an Oscar (1991) or, god-forbid a Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), but he never got anywhere close to being believably flustered by a comedic situation.